Well, this is new. I usually review anime long after it’s faded into irrelevance. This time I’m reviewing a movie within a month of its Japanese release. Spoilers actually matter. Proceed with caution.

Kimi no Na wa currently occupies the #1 ranked spot on MyAnimeList. It’s the first non-Ghibli anime film to make over 10 billion yen. (Based on current ticket prices, that means at least 6 people watched it.) While we’re at it, fuck Studio Ghibli. When I tell Japanese people that I like anime, that’s the first thing they ask me: “Do you like Ghibli films?” No, I don’t. Critically, yes, they’re well made, but the stories are boring and childish.

Kimi no Na wa (Your Name) is written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, whose other movies I didn’t particularly care for but were generally well-received. I’m not a movie guy. I’ve never given a +++ to a standalone movie. I’d rather watch a longer, better-developed story in 22 minute chunks. Kimi no Na wa makes efficient use of its time, but it’s still only as long as 5 episodes of anime. However much a movie packs into that time, the format just doesn’t have the potential of a full anime season.

Kimi no Na wa is the story of a boy and a girl who may or may not be connected somehow. I fear I may have already spoiled too much. The movie has an excellent intro segment that previews the movie with fewer spoilers, so just watch the movie.

Final Grade: ++

Well, that was a boring, uninformative review. I may update this post when nobody cares about the movie anymore.

Space Brothers has the best portrayal of an adult sibling relationship I’ve ever seen in anime. Most of the anime isn’t about that.

Space Brothers has the best portrayal of a realistic space mission I’ve ever seen in anime. Most of the anime isn’t about that.

What’s Space Brothers really about? Trolling. Space Brothers is an anime about the apparent trollfest that is astronaut training. It has some excellent moments, but given the length of the show and its repeated troll-based plot devices, I can’t say it’s great overall.

Space Brothers has a large cast of good characters but few great ones. I’d say there are four great characters: the Nanba brothers, Kenji, and Sharon (she made me care more about ALS than the ice bucket challenge ever could’ve). Everyone else is basically a personality quirk/racial stereotype plus an emotional backstory. Once again, it’s not bad, but it’s too simple and repetitive a formula to keep you excited.

I usually like long anime, but I can’t say the same for slow anime. Despite having many excellent moments, the show takes too long to get to them. If the pace had been a bit faster, or if the construction of the plot and characters had been more varied, the show could’ve been great. Instead, it was just pretty good.

I designed my ratings flowchart to give a + to long-running shounen anime that had fallen from grace. I gladly gave it to Naruto, but it’s with a heavy apathetic heart that I can’t do the same for Bleach. Despite horribly jumping the shark, the majority of Naruto was good. Bleach didn’t even come close.

Bleach had one good arc. You could say it’s like Rurouni Kenshin in that regard, but Kenshin was fillerized to hell. Ok, Bleach was too. The point is that the Bleach manga was much worse for much longer.

The introductory arc was mediocre. The Soul Society arc was excellent. The Hueco Mundo arc was uninspired. The Fullbring arc lacked a sense of importance. The Quincy arc was mailed-in.

What did Bleach do wrong?

Repeating the Soul Society formula for both Hueco Mundo and the Quincies

Too much time spent on minor fights

Power level inconsistency

Too many annoying characters/character interactions

What did Bleach do right?

A fair number of quotable lines

A main character who wasn’t annoying or effeminate

A large cast of characters

Cool character design

Good music

Here I was going to link to a pretty good video that got into the artistic issues behind the decline of Bleach, but TV Tokyo was a bitch and threw an unjustified copyright claim at it before I finished writing this post. Basically, Tite Kubo was annoyed with his editors, hated the busy manga artist lifestyle, and stopped trying. I have no reason to believe any of it wasn’t true.

Final Grade: ~

With the end of Bleach, the only manga I’m still reading in English are Akame ga Kill, Attack on Titan, and Hajime no Ippo. They’ll probably end in that order. Aside from these three, I’ll probably never read manga in English again.

Everyone knows that Trump’s a shitty candidate, albeit for reasons as lazy as “he’s a racist!”, or as shallow as “his name was actually Drumpf!”. However, if you’re going by a lesser-of-two-evils analysis, Trump is by far the un-worse choice.

Trump won’t have enough congressional support to push his policies through. Hillary will.

But enough about Trump. Let’s talk about why Hillary can go fuck herself. First, a few things I don’t care about. I don’t have a problem with anything she did before running for Senate. I don’t care that she’s a mediocre speaker. I don’t care that she’s a woman, and I don’t care that she’s white. I don’t care (much) about the e-mail controversy or Benghazi (yeah, it’s corrupt, but if you’re not going to punish Bush/Cheney for the shit they pulled, you’re not going to get Hillary either).

My beef with Hillary began when she shamelessly moved to New York for the sole purpose of running for Senate. Why New York? Like every decision in her career, it was a deliberate political calculation. A Senate seat would be opening soon in New York, unlike in Illinois and Arkansas. There was no rule barring a new resident from running for office. New York is a majority Democratic state. With Clinton’s connections and name recognition, she could easily win. I didn’t have a political affiliation at the time, and I had a somewhat positive opinion of Bill Clinton’s presidency, but I thought Hillary’s carpetbagging was kind of douchey and tried to convince my parents to vote for the other guy (they didn’t). A few years after Hillary was elected, I moved out of state for college. Somehow I resisted the urge to run for Senate.

I didn’t pay attention to Hillary again until she ran for president in 2008. Despite my objections to Hillary’s run for Senate, I didn’t have any immediate problems with her running for President. Then I watched the primary debates. Hillary’s smug sense of entitlement came back tenfold. Sure that she’d win the Democratic primary, she presented herself as the most conservative candidate on stage to posture for the general election. She constantly bashed the other candidates’ liberal positions, including those on national defense, civil liberties, and gay rights. Despite having barely served a term as senator herself, she led the attacks on Barack Obama’s inexperience. Remember the 3 a.m. phone call ads?

Despite Hillary having a huge early lead, Democratic voters surprisingly got their shit together and voted for Obama’s Hope and Change™. (Somehow they weren’t on board with Hillary condescendingly offering Obama the VP slot on her “dream ticket” as soon as she sensed Obama could possibly beat her.) Barack Obama wouldn’t return that favor for his VP slot, but he was under enough political pressure to at least hand Hillary the Secretary of State job.

In the 2016 primary season, Hillary tried to walk back her “I’m the most conservative Democrat!” strategy and this time present herself as a champion of liberalism. There was just one problem: her main competition was an actual liberal. So Hillary did the next best thing: she relied on superdelegates, her husband’s political network, and DNC cronyism to keep the race from ever getting too close.

In conclusion, Hillary Clinton is an obnoxious asshole who not only feels entitled to political office but will say or do anything to get there. Don’t reward this bitch by voting for her.

Moved from Tochigi to Chiba. I’m expecting to stay in Japan for another two years.

Another reason I’ve been slow on the updates is due to getting hacked several years back. I’ve done what I could to clean it up, but I’ve been unable to completely resolve it. The lag on this site affects post writing, and the annoyance makes me that much less motivated to write. Anyone good with WordPress want to help?

I’ll be in New York from late-July to mid-August. Anyone think they can inspire me to write more?

Psycho-Pass 2 is better than Psycho-Pass 1. Yes, the best of Psycho-Pass 1 is better than anything in Psycho-Pass 2, but what about the rest of it? Remember Spooky Boogie? Artsy murder girl? Hunter guy with robot dogs? Things didn’t kick into high gear until the end of episode 11, which was literally halfway through the 22-episode season. The ending of season 1, while satisfying, wasn’t as good as the arc that preceded it.

Season 2 jumps right into the main plot. It’s all action from start to finish. There are no filler bosses. It’s (relatively) low on philosophical rambling. There’s one more lesbian. The violence is extreme and gratuitious. Sadly we live in a day and age when hyperviolence isn’t considered a good thing. What’s the first thing you saw in season 1? A cuddly mascot character THAT’S ACTUALLY A WEAPON! CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT SHIT?! Seriously novitaminA, you need to stop trying to make violence cute. We can do without another bomb that’s also a teddy bear. It’s neither cute nor violent.

The most impressive thing about season 2 is that it maintained the integrity of Akane’s character. I was expecting the season to take one of two directions: either Akane would turn into a Kogami clone or she’s revert into a helpless pussy who needed Kogami to come back and save the day. Thankfully, the show allowed her to be a badass on the detective front while maintaining her laid back personality.

Don’t get me wrong, season 2 is far from perfect. Lesbianism aside, Cunty McCuntington is one of the worst characters I’ve ever seen. The Sibyl System basically throws in the towel. The old lady’s actions were incoherent. Some of the early bad guys were pointlessly overpowered. There are probably some other points I’m forgetting, but I was supposed to write this post about 2 years ago, so deal with it.

The internet is abuzz with whitewashing accusations over a white chick is being cast as Motoko Kusanagi. This makes no sense to me, because Motoko Kusanagi is white.

Let me throw out my “I’m not a racist” qualifications before I start being racist. I’ve actually seen Ghost in the Shell. I live in Japan. White features being omnipresent in anime character designs often annoys me. Whitewashing in movies often annoys me. (A white guy isn’t the Prince of Persia. A black guy isn’t that Indian guy from The Martian.) I’m even “Asian-American” by some standards of the bullshit term. There, that should cover me.

As a moviegoer, the biggest problem with whitewashing isn’t political incorrectness. It’s breaking the fourth wall. The whole time you’re watching the movie, you’re thinking, “Why is this character white?” It takes you out of the movie.

Yes, there are other problems with whitewashing too, but the bottom line is that Motoko Kusanagi looks white. You’d have to put a lot more makeup and padding on a Japanese woman than a white woman to make her look like The Major. We’ve already suspended our disbelief about her race when watching the anime. A white actress won’t break the fourth wall at this point. On the contrary, an Asian actress would. Remember when the FF7: Advent Children character designs came out? Everyone was thrown off by how awkwardly Asian they looked compared to the original game and character art.

Now let’s take a look at the story itself, which I’d love to accuse the social justice warriors of neglecting, though it’s far more likely that they don’t know shit about it in the first place. The whole premise of Ghost in the Shell is that everyone in this futuristic society swaps out their original flesh body parts for enhanced high-tech parts—a “shell” so to speak. Thus, their bodies don’t have to look anything like their race. There’s nothing inconsistent about Motoko Kusanagi looking white, nor do I have problem with her lesbian friend also looking white (though I wouldn’t have a problem with her looking Asian either).

The “Asian-Americans” complaining about the casting are also white—they’re white knights. Why is there “Asian”-American outrage instead of “Japanese”-American outrage? Casting a Chinese actress would result is a ton of bitching too. (Remember Memoirs of a Geisha?) These are Asian-Americans being offended on behalf of Japanese-Americans being offended on behalf of Japanese people, who don’t care. It’s like that time a museum exhibition featuring kimonos was shut down by “Asian-American” white knights. Guess what? Japanese people WANT foreigners to wear kimonos. You know why? Because Japanese people are proud of their culture. It’s these dipshit white knights who see Japanese culture as inferior and thus in need of defending.

In conclusion, giving a white chick a Japanese name is preferable to slapping whiteface on a Japanese chick. Also, this movie will probably suck.

Final Grade: +++

There are only two problems with this anime. The first is quasi-pedophilia. The second is ham-fisted depth. Here we have a perfectly good story about a dude/chick who goes around killing little girls, and the anime almost blows it by feeling the need to give the killer a DEEP reason for it. It’s total garbage. This is why I like yanderes. They can go around killing whomever they want, no questions asked.

I recently wrote about Durarara’s Japanese being too complicated for me to understand. Turns out it wasn’t entirely my fault. Durarara doesn’t understand Japanese either.

Durarara’s 2nd–4th seasons were subtitled shou, ten, and ketsu. These terms come from the phrase kishoutenketsu, which represents the traditional dramatic structure of introduction (ki), exposition (shou), climax (ten), and conclusion (ketsu). It’s commonly represented as a vertically symmetrical pyramid, though I’d say it’s much more accurate to skew it to the upper-right.

You start from scratch, build up to a climax, and tail off into a resolution.

Durarara followed a slightly different pattern.

Durarara’s second, third, and first half of the fourth season were pure exposition. I was tempted at times to use the dreaded s-word.

Durarara S1: ++

Durarara S2: ++

Durarara S3: +

Durarara S4: +

Final Series Grade: +

I’m glad Durarara got a continuation. It just wasn’t as good as the first season. While the characters and power balance were one-of-a-kind, the cast size ultimately didn’t pay off for the amount of development it got. The smaller yet better-managed cast of the first season put together a more satisfying story. There was also that annoying plot device of a character going so mad with power that he forgot why he sought power in the first place. Idiots like that need a good beating. (Yeah, he got one, but it was too little too late, as is so often the case.)